613: Building Relationships with Handwritten Notes | Rick Elmore

Rick Elmore is an entrepreneur, sales and marketing expert, and former college and professional football athlete. As the Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper to scale handwritten communication, helping businesses of all industries scale this unique marketing platform to stand out from their competition and build meaningful relationships with clients, customers, and employees. 

Founded in 2018 and based in Tempe, Arizona, Simply Noted has grown into a thriving company with clients of various sizes across the country including hospitality, real estate, insurance, nonprofit, franchise, B2B, and many more sectors. Rick has served as the company’s CEO since its founding, for more than three years, with over a decade of sales and marketing experience.

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Building Relationships with Handwritten Notes

Introduction 

George Leith: This is the Conquer Local Podcast, a show about billion-dollar sales leaders, marketers leading local economic growth and entrepreneurs that have created their dream organizations. They want to share their secrets, giving you the distilled version of their extraordinary feats. Our hope is, with the tangible takeaways from each episode, you can rewire, rework and reimagine your business. I’m George Leith, and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Rick Elmore. Rick is an entrepreneur, sales and marketing expert and a former college and professional athlete. He’s the CEO of Simply Noted, a remarkable handwritten mail platform, where he developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper to scale handwritten communication. He’s helping businesses of all industries scale and build meaningful relationships with their clients, customers and employees. The company, founded in 2018, is based in Tempe, Arizona and has grown into a thriving company with clients of various sizes across the country, including the fields of hospitality, real estate, insurance, nonprofit and business-to-business. Get ready, conquerors, for Rick Elmore coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

George Leith: Hey Rick, it’s really exciting to have you on this show. How warm is it in Phoenix, Arizona because where I am in the middle of Canada, we always look south at this time of year. Well, thanks for joining us on the show.

Rick Elmore: Thanks for having me. And yeah, I think we earn, well, I guess I shouldn’t say that because it’s really cold there, but we definitely earn the cooler weather here in Phoenix because those summer months, the blasting 120-degree heat, that wears down on you.

Former College and Professional Football Athlete

George Leith: No, that’s absolutely right. What I’ve found over the years is that everybody wants everybody else’s weather, that’s for sure. So Rick, CEO of a company called Simply Noted. We talked a little bit about it before the commercial break, but give us a little bit of an overview of your background and I’d love to hear a little bit about your time in the NFL.

Rick Elmore: Yeah, that’s a great question. So my background is in athletics. I played college and professional football and was an athlete for about two decades. Was lucky to have a pretty good career at the University of Arizona, then was drafted in 2011. Spent three seasons in the NFL, so I got to live out my childhood dream, but I went back and did, or when I got done with football, I got into corporate medical device sales and marketing. Had a pretty good career there for almost six years. First-year I was rookie of the year and for the next five years was either the top 1% or top five sales rep in our company, but really had an itch that I couldn’t scratch and I was looking for something else. So I went back and did my MBA in 2017 and that’s where the idea happened for Simply Noted.

Entrepreneurship – When did it all start? 

George Leith: So the one thing that you’re highlighting is a bit of a secret in the sales business, to find people that were in competitive sports at a high level and hire them for sales. So I could see why that medical company wanted to add you there, but the calling of entrepreneurship bites all of us. And how did this, before we get into what Simply Noted is, when did it hit you that you wanted to start a business?

Rick Elmore: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think being an entrepreneur, you’re kind of born with it. There’s just something inside of you that you can’t fulfill with a normal job. Both my parents were small business owners. My stepdad was a contractor. My mom basically was a medical biller, but that really afforded them the life to be flexible and to be involved in everything that we did and I always knew that was something that I wanted if I ever had kids, was to be available. The more success I had in corporate, really what they wanted you to do was work the corporate ladder, fly all over the country. I saw what my executives were doing. A lot of them were divorced and didn’t have relationships with their family and that was just something I never wanted, so that’s when I went back and did my MBA. In 2017 I was in a marketing class and that’s really where it all started, but I just knew. You are an athlete and you have all those transferrable skills that you developed over two decades of being an athlete. All the hard work, perseverance, the desire, the grit, those things that are just built into you. I think it really helps prepare you to be successful in life after sport or to be a successful entrepreneur.

CEO of Simply Noted – A Tech company with Handwritten Notes

George Leith: So all the framework is there and it looks like you found a problem to solve. And when I was reading through the pre-show notes from Sully, our producer, I go back to the days when I used to get a lot of mail and I don’t mean email, I mean stale mail. And I would be like, “Ah, crap, another letter or boy, there’s a lot of junk mail in here,” and then the world changed and we’re getting the odd email and we’re like, whoa, this is cool. That’s how old I am when we started getting emails, and now we’re at the point where I think the entire script has flipped where I get a letter in the mail, like a physical letter, I’m like, “Whoa, this is…” and I read through it and it’s an exciting moment because there’s not a lot of them. And if I get another bloody email, we have filters set up for all that stuff because there’s so much coming at us. So that really is the premise from what I’m reading in the notes here, you founded a tech company that focuses on handwritten mail.

Rick Elmore: Well, absolutely. I think what is old is new again. We live in a digital age, since the internet boom era, the late nineties, and early two thousands till basically the year 2020, no, now we’re in the AI revolution, but what people are lacking is a personal touch. Nobody’s competing in the mailbox anymore. Like you said, everybody used to compete in the mailbox until digital took over. And really what we’re trying to do here at Simply Noted is build a platform, or what we have done is build a platform and a technology that allows clients or companies to leverage our technology by integrating either using Zapier or Integromat, Integrately or make an API integration or just simply use our website and automate it. So you can automate sending handwritten notes, you can scale sending handwritten notes, all completely pen written, not printed, personalize it to that recipient. So when they get something in the mail, it’s almost like they’re excited now because it’s so rare. The average person receives less than five handwritten notes a year. I doubt that’s even an accurate number. I think it would be less right and it’s just a really good way for businesses to stand out and win relationships, differentiate themselves from the competition, build loyalty and build a community. When you’re building a business, you need raving fans. You need loyalty and you need a raving community because if you have a community, people that are loyal to you, they’re going to get out, create action, tell their friends and keep buying and help your business be successful.

Building a Human Connection with Handwritten Mail 

George Leith: It’s funny when I started my career in sales 30-some-odd years ago, I had a mentor and one of his, I thought it was a trick at the time, one of his tricks was whenever he would sign a contract with a customer, he would write a handwritten note, stick a business card in it and either drop it off physically at the business or mail it to the client. And as time went on, trying that trick, you would have customers that would actually stack up the handwritten notes on a shelf behind their desk in their office because they found it to be so personal. And I’ve used that play a few times recently in the last 10 years and I’m finding to your point, it is like, “Holy crap, I got a handwritten note from this person.” It really builds that human connection.

Rick Elmore: It really does. And what you were just talking about is I always talk to our clients about it, its shelf life of our handwritten notes. When’s the last time you saw somebody print out a thank you email or thank you text and put it on their fridge or put it on their shelf or on their bookcase? It never happens. We’re told stories from our clients pretty often. I mean I wouldn’t say it’s every day, but they’ll tell us that they get calls from their clients about a handwritten note they sent them three or four months prior, or we have service-based customers like roofing and solar. When they go back into the client’s home 3, 4, or 5 months later, they’ll see the handwritten note that they sent them still either on the counter or on a shelf. And they just laugh because it’s like people appreciate it and they hold onto it. It’s almost like a little small gift and that’s what we’re trying to do is help them create those personal gestures, those gifts that scale. 

Developing a Handwriting Robot

George Leith: So you’ve got to meet up with the finance folks and a marketing leader is listening to this broadcast. They like what Rick’s talking about. They’re interested in Simply Noted. The first question going to be asked is what is the cost to do something like this? And I’m interested in understanding what the scalability is. If you had an organization that had let’s say 50 sales reps, they were executing on six contracts a month, is there a way to scale this that makes sense from the finance side of the business?

Rick Elmore: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean that’s really when you dig into the technology of Simply Noted. We’re the only company in the world that has actually truly built their own handwriting robot to do what this does. There are some companies out there that act or leverage AxiDraw plotters. They’re not scalable, they’re cheap, they break all the time, plus they run off old antiquated software and some auto pens. What political figures and presidents would use that would sign documents for them? But what we’ve built is a robotic technology that’s completely vertically integrated that makes sending handwritten notes efficient, easy as possible. Right now our current production capacity is 10 to 15,000 a day. It really just depends on the length of the handwritten note and since we build these handwriting robots in-house here at Simply Noted, we just scale as our business scales. And going back to your question of pricing, it really just depends on how much you buy, but it’s way more affordable than going to the store and buying a greeting card. Our prices start at $2.67 before postage, so you’re usually looking at about $3.25 US dollars. But most of our businesses aren’t paying anywhere near that because they’re sending in volume so they’re getting pricing discounts.

George Leith: So Rick, the question I have is, I see boxes behind you here on the screen, is that the robots? Does the robot, can I get that and put it in my own office or does everything flow through a central hub in your offices? I’m trying to understand that.

Rick Elmore: Yeah, so I’m actually in our warehouse right now, our storage warehouse because I’m hardwired into the internet so we can get better internet speed. But so we are exploring, we do have a few companies that do mailing services that lease our robots. We are looking at a direct-to-consumer buying our robots. We’re probably a year, if not two years from that because our robots, we just got done building them probably six months ago. So there’s a lot of iterations before we can go to the consumer and make sure it’s perfect. These are, they’re robots, they’re moving things, they’re breaking, they need updates. It’s a very iterative process as I call it. As you make updates, you see things you want to change and improve. So we’re still in that process, but comparing it to the technology that was available off the shelf, it’s not even in the same universe. I would say this is in a parallel universe that’s on steroids. It’s just a better technology handwriting engine, which really makes the handwritten note look as genuine as possible. But yeah, I mean we are exploring the idea of selling these robots, but right now we’re kind of like, we want you to work through us to help you make it as efficient as possible.

George Leith: Well, and the idea of having hardware is also the same as building your own software. Somebody’s got to maintain that stuff. So there is definitely a benefit in the fact that your experts are maintaining the tools and not having to find a service person to do that work on the equipment. So $3.50, I sign a half a million dollar contract, you’re saying to me for $3.50, you’ll just make sure that the handwritten note is sent, it looks authentic, you could put it into some sort of a bit of an automated workflow where at this moment in the journey, it signals you guys to send the note. Am I reading into it correctly?

Rick Elmore: It’s really as easy as just that. Anybody can send one handwritten note or send thousands. The idea of our platform was to make it easy for anybody to send a handwritten note. As Simply Noted scales, we may add or adapt to what the market is asking us to do is include more gifts going into the account-based marketing world or CX customer service world where you’re looking at companies like Sendoso or Lob or Alice, these gifting companies, they’re kind of going another step. A lot of our clients are asking us to do that as well but right now we think the gift is the handwritten note. We think it’s a really good opportunity for you, in an affordable and efficient way, to connect with your audience and build those relationships. And over the last five years, we’ve been working really hard to refine this product and make it the best, in our opinion, in the world.

Handwritten Mail for Scaling Businesses

George Leith: And I like what you mentioned there around account-based marketing because I think we go right to the close, right to the contract and I should send a thank you note, but I think what you’re saying is, at any moment in that customer journey where we want to have a personalized touch on a prospect, that handwritten note might move the trust and the brand recognition a little further down the road. So it’s not just a post-sale kind of thing. You could use it in account-based marketing as well and at $3.50 for a touch, that’s actually quite a reasonable fee to put into…and I’m thinking enterprise or upper mid-market, that’s not a large expense compared to what I see others investing in account-based marketing.

Rick Elmore: Yeah and I always like telling this story, even though we like consulting with our clients, the best thing to do is just say thank you because the economics of loyalty are just massive. If you can keep clients around for years, your business is going to grow exponentially. But I started this business off of sales. I used this as a sales tool. I would send this out to clients before I started this company and the response rates were just amazing. My first test batch when I wrote this on a really crappy technology, I was using a plotter that looked like this, just a cheap pen plotter and it took me about a month to create 500 handwritten notes and I pulled a list off a list service of clients I wasn’t working with. And out of those 500 handwritten notes, I had a $50,000 a month quota and had 28 doctors call me back and these doctors were like, “If you’re in sales and your client’s calling you, you’re doing something right.” That never happens.

George Leith: Unbelievable.

Rick Elmore: It’s always you just chase, and chase, and chase and close.

George Leith: That’s unbelievable.

Rick Elmore: And these doctors were like, “Rick, first off, thank you.” And they’re like, “Thank you for number one sending me a handwritten note. Nobody does that.” Everyone’s doing the same thing, knocking on their doors, bothering their front office ladies, emails, social DMs, whatever. And these doctors were like, “Let’s schedule a meeting. I want to talk to you more about this.” And of those 500 handwritten notes on a $ 50,000-a-month quota, I did $280,000 in sales, and $20,000 in commission in about six weeks. My whole company was going nuts and when you think of account-based marketing at scale, it’s expensive. There are these platforms that are sending like 20, 30, and $50 packages, so you can only send so many before it adds up. And really when it comes down to it, think about it, it’s about creating a connection, not bribing. So if you can connect them emotionally in a powerful message, in a handwritten note with a real envelope, what they’re thinking is that you’re giving them your time and not paying a service to send a gift. So I think we’re really onto something over here. I’m really excited about it. The tides are changing. Since we got this technology done and we’re kind of heading into our fifth year, the momentum’s building and I think the market is looking for something like this and we’re excited to be there to help people do this.

Getting in Touch with Rick Elmore

George Leith: Well, absolutely the market is because the number of sales leaders and marketing leaders that I speak to in a month that talk about the clutter, talk about the noise, the fact that how do we break through that as technology continues to be democratized, it’s easier to get the best tech and you’re meeting the market where it needs to be right now. So I’m impressed with this and using something that it might have been considered old school is new school again. I think back to some episodes that we’ve had with thought leaders over the last 6, 8, and 10 months where some of the very best ideas are humanizing technology. We’ve got all this technology that helps us to be more efficient, but it also makes us seem robotic. Whereas what you’re doing here is really getting back to a human connection and throughout all motions of sales, pre-sales, post-sale, customer service. So it’s incredible and I can tell by the excitement in your voice and those metrics that you just gave us are incredible. There isn’t an organization out there that wouldn’t invest in something that has that kind of conversion rate. So congratulations on a very exciting project infusing those two types of technology together. So if people want to find out more about Simply Noted and Rick Elmore and this great company that you built in Arizona out of Tempe, where do we find you, Rick?

Rick Elmore: Yeah, that’s a great question. So first off, I’m on LinkedIn basically all day. So LinkedIn is basically social media for businesses. So you just go on LinkedIn and just look up Rick Elmore, E L M O R E. You’ll be able to find me on there. I do a pretty good job of getting back to people within an hour. Between calls, I’m always checking my LinkedIn. Or you can go to simplynoted.com just how it’s spelled, S I M as in Mary, P L Y noted.com. And we always ask everybody, don’t even pay to try this service, just go and request a sample kit. And what we do is we’ll send you a nice sample kit with a bunch of handwriting samples inside, flyers, case studies so you can touch it. And once you touch it, that’s when we get those phone calls back and people are like, “No way. I thought this was printed. This is really pen written. How do you do this?” And then we just get to talking and we’re really just an extension of their business. We talk about what they’re trying to do, what project they want to execute. We show them how to integrate if that’s what they want to do and automate. But really it’s easy if you have a spreadsheet, names and addresses and an Excel file or CSV file. Like you can send 50,000 or 500,000 handwritten notes in literally two minutes, like custom, every word, completely custom. And just when you think about that and how you can track it in marketing with some CallRail numbers or call tracking or QR codes and landing pages, it gets pretty exciting.

George Leith: You’re blowing my mind, Rick. I’m just thinking about all the ways there’s… I bet you there’s a bunch of salespeople right now that are going to your URL, so we’ll make sure that we put your LinkedIn and your URL into the show notes. Rick, thanks for joining us today. We’ll let you get back to writing all those notes and dealing with all your inbound leads. It sounds like you definitely have cracked the code and thanks for joining us on the Conquer Local Podcast. We appreciate it.

Rick Elmore: It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Conclusion

George Leith: Well, as you can tell by my enthusiasm, I have always been a huge fan of the handwritten note. I used it back when it wasn’t cool when you were getting tons of mail and it was a way to cut through the clutter back then but imagine now, where the only mail we’re really receiving is stuff from our banks or maybe our insurance company or something we’d thought we’d shut off to get an e-communication. So now when you send a handwritten note and it arrives in the mailbox, it is something that really sticks out. It drives top-of-mind awareness and from the metrics that you heard from Rick, it has an incredible conversion rate because it is a great way to cut through today’s clutter of all the online communication. If you liked Rick’s episode, Building Relationships with Handwritten Notes, let’s continue the conversation. Check out episode 501, Staying Human in the Age of Data with Rishad Tobaccowala, or episode 442, Master Predictive Sales Data and Instinct with Chris Bondarenko. Please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you listen to the podcast and thanks for joining us this week on the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.